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Left-Over Larkin Pork and Beans
Put two cups of beans with the pork in an agate sauce pan and cover them with two cups of cold water. Bring to a boil and cook until soft. Mash through a strainer and add one cup of milk, two tablespoons of butter, two teaspoons of Larkin Table Salt, oneeighth teaspoon of Larkin White Pepper. Heat again but do not boil, and serve very hot. These proportions will serve five people.
A thrift soup built on the remains of a pot of baked pork and beans, thinned with milk and pushed through a sieve. It comes together in under half an hour and rests almost entirely on how you season it.
- The beans are already cookedThis starts with leftover baked beans and their piece of salt pork, not dried beans. "Cook until soft" here means simmering the already-tender beans in the water only until they slump and the pork gives up its flavour; the recipe gives no timing.
- Salt: taste before you add anyTwo teaspoons is far too much for a base of baked beans and salt pork, both of which are already heavily salted. Season at the very end, a pinch at a time, after the milk has gone in.
- An agate saucepanAgate, or agateware, is speckled enamel over steel, and non-reactive; it was a common kitchen pan of the period. Any heavy stainless or enamelled pan works. A thin pan will catch the milk on the bottom.
- StrainingA food mill or a stick blender gets you there faster than a sieve and wooden spoon. Fish out the pork rind first, and pull off the pork meat to chop and return to the pot.
- Do not boil after the milkMilk boiled in a thick, salty bean pure e can curdle and catch on the bottom. Bring it just to steaming.
- ConsistencyTwo cups of beans, two of water and one of milk gives a thick purée — closer to a potage than a broth. Loosen with more milk or with the bean liquor if you have it.
- Larkin brandsLarkin Table Salt and Larkin White Pepper were the firm's own grocery lines. Plain fine salt and finely ground white pepper are exact substitutes; white pepper is worth keeping to, as it disappears into the pale soup.
- YieldFive servings as written, which suggests soup-plate portions of about a cup as a first course rather than a main.
The Larkin Company of Buffalo, New York, began as a soap manufacturer and grew into one of the great mail-order houses of the period, selling groceries, furniture and household goods through a club-and-premium system in which customers earned merchandise with their purchases. Cookbooks like this one were part of that machinery: recipes calling for Larkin salt, Larkin pepper, Larkin baking powder meant that the act of cooking dinner kept reordering the pantry. The dish itself belongs to the older tradition of the left-over — a habit more economic than a culinary one — and bean purée thinned with milk is one of the most durable examples, appearing in American cookery under names like bean soup and purée of beans. What makes this version of its moment is the assumption that a pot of baked pork and beans is simply always there in the icebox, waiting to become something else.